ER doctor a good fiction writer

ot many adolescents touched by the power of stories decide to prepare for
a writing career by going to medical school. But that was roughly the
path taken by Dr. Vincent Lam, whose compelling first book of fiction, Bloodletting&Miraculous Cures, is published this week by Doubleday Canada.

Lam
opens a door into the world of successful, assimilated young
Chinese-Canadian professionals and he does so with the authority of an
insider. We have not heard much about people like Chen and Ming and
their friend Sri, nor Ming's rejected non-Chinese lover Fitz in
Canadian fiction before.

The 12 interlocking tales in the book
follow these characters' path from medical school at the University of
Toronto to the city's crowded hospitals where, as physicians, they face
a variety of difficult patients. In contrast, the older generation of
Chinese-Canadian writers —Wayson Choy, Judy Fong Bates, Paul Yee, Fred
Wah and others — paint a harsher reality of displacement, departure,
exclusion, of backbreaking menial work in restaurants and laundries.

"It's
easy to be fluid and functional in Canadian society," Lam says. "But at
the same time, one's (Chinese) perspective or lens is slightly
different. My generation, whether we are originally from Austria, or
Africa or China, are at a unique point in Canadian history because the
barriers have fallen."

"Sometimes, I still get carded," laughs
Lam. He is 31 and, though he may look too young to drink legally, he is
married to a fellow doctor and is the father of 11-month-old Theodore.
Wearing a red T-shirt, Lam is talkative and cheerful.

"Emergency
medicine is all I do. If you like something unexpected always around
the corner, it's very good. It puts you at the cutting edge of life,"
he says. Besides, it gives him most mornings off to write.

He
has promised Doubleday a novel set in the Chinese community in Saigon,
to appear next year, but before that, he'll have a non-fiction book out
about influenza, co-authored with another doctor. It adds up to a
running start at a high-voltage literary career that has received the
endorsement of Margaret Atwood and Wayson Choy.

Lam was born in
London, Ont., into an ethnic Chinese family that had emigrated from
Vietnam at the time of the Vietnam War. Cantonese was the language at
home.

In Bloodletting, a story called "The Long
Migration" describes the Canadian medical student Chen's visit to
Australia, to watch over his grandfather, who is peeing blood.
Grandfather was once something of a wild man, but is now dying of
kidney cancer in a retirement home. Chen is there to alert the other
family members when the end is imminent.

"The arc of that story,
the feeling of big (historical) forces in it have to do with my family.
I did go to Brisbane; I knew my grandfather. The other stories are
somewhat autobiographical but not much." His grandfather, a respected
schoolmaster as well as a gambler and womanizer ("he had two
personalities"), will be the central character of his forthcoming
novel.

Lam was 15 or 16, he says, when he made his first
attempts at writing after reading and rereading Ernest Hemingway's Nick
Adams stories. "They were perfect," he says.

"I've wanted to
write my grandfather's story ever since I've wanted to write. But I
thought it would also be good to have a job, to be involved in the
world in an external way. I didn't foresee how labour-intensive it
would be to become a doctor — I didn't write during my training at all,
then went back to it."

Having accumulated a pile of rejection
slips from literary magazines, he took a writing course at U of T
taught by novelist Michael Winter and joined a writing group that met
for a time after the course ended.

He also enrolled in the
correspondence program of the Humber School for Writers, where he was
mentored by Toronto writer Kim Moritsugu and Howard Norman, the
American author of The Bird Artist.

Around the same time,
about three years ago, Lam met Atwood and her partner, Graeme Gibson,
aboard The Akademic Ioffe, a Russian scientific vessel that is leased
by Peregrine Expeditions to take nature-loving travellers to the
Arctic. He was the ship's doctor.

"I've done it a few times —
it's a fantastic ship. Margaret is a really great traveller, very
observant, and so is Graeme. After the voyage, I sent her my stories (I
didn't yet have enough for a book) and she said, `What do you want? Do
you want me to say something nice or to say something honestly?'"

In
the event, Atwood was both honest and sufficiently impressed to give
the manuscript to Maya Mavjee, the publisher of Doubleday.

Wayson Choy, who calls Lam "a stunning talent" on the dustjacket of Bloodletting&Miraculous Cures, was sent the manuscript for comment just as he was recovering from a heart attack last October.

He
was particularly touched by the coincidence: "I was reading the book in
hospital and it made me understand the humanity of the people working
around me," he says.